File picture of a protest against the custody death of Thangjam Manorama in 2004

Imphal. Feb. 19: After winning two back-to-back awards at a recently concluded festival in Mumbai, Haobam Paban Kumar, a final-year film direction student at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Calcutta, is all set to go places.

His 77-minute film, AFSPA 1958 (short for Armed Forces Special Powers Act), documenting the outrage against the controversial legislation in the aftermath of the custody killing of Thangjam Manorama by troops of the Assam Rifles in 2004, has been invited to prestigious film festivals across the world.

The film, which won the International Jury Award and the International Film Critics Award at the Mumbai International Film Festival, has been invited to Canada?s Hot Docs documentary film festival, slated for April and to two other festivals in South Korea and Britain later in the year.

Though several films from the Northeast had entered the competition section over the years, Paban Kumar is the first director from the region to have won the coveted awards.

The film begins with a shot of the lifeless body of Manorama and ends with a scene of dying Pebam Chittaranjan, a youth who committed self-immolation in protest against the act.

The citation for the jury award hailed the film as ?strong cinematic narrative and sincere presentation? of the events while the critics award citation described the film as an ?illuminating portrayal of a community under siege and its fight for justice?.

The film produced by B. Sunzu, a senior journalist of Imphal, recorded the people?s upheaval and brutality demonstrated by the state forces on the protesters. Paban Kumar has already produced eight documentary films.

Back home, information and broadcasting minister Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, at the concluding ceremony of the Mumbai film festival, mentioned his film saying, ?We can learn many things from such documentary films.?

The two awards also caught the director completely by surprise. ?I did not expect to win the hearts of the jury and the international critics, not to talk of the overwhelming response from the viewers. AFSPA 1958 was the most talked about film at the festival,? he said.